Signal Processors

There's already a decent range of products providing digital emulations of vintage guitar amps, but iZotope's Direct X plug-in goes a lot further, offering no fewer than seven processing modules, and is intended to model every kind of distortion you'll ever need.

Convolving reverbs are coming down in price as more manufacturers make their own. We check out Emagic's new plug-in, which is one of the more affordable ones around, but still allows you to create your own reverbs from favourite spaces.

Native Instruments' flagship modular software synth has now reached version 4, dispensing with the dongle copy-protection that bothered v3 owners, adding many user-friendly features and allowing even greater scope for personalising your patches.

TC's plug-in powerhouse is now available as an external Firewire-connected rack unit.

Although delay can be one of the most simple studio effects, software delay plug-ins often provide a bewildering array of options. So we take a look at what all the sliders and switches do, and provide advice on how best to use them.

Reverb is vital for most types of modern music production, so it's no surprise to find that many sequencers provide a variety of reverb plug-ins. But what do all those different parameters do?

There are many choices to make when equalising within your sequencer. Which type of EQ is best? How should you set up the different bands? Which controls do you need? We provide some answers...

Following on from our discussion of compression and limiting last month, let's look at how you can use the related processes of gating and expansion within your DAW.

The latest plug-in for the TC Powercore card allows you to extract frequency responses from commercial tracks and apply them to your own mixes.

All of the main MIDI + Audio sequencers now have a bewildering array of compression and limiting plug-ins built in, but many home musicians are unclear about what all those controls and options do. And with so many varieties of each plug-in available, which one should you choose for the job in hand?

This plug-in produces essentially the same results as its analogue rackmount counterparts, so if you already know and like the BBE process, you should take no convincing.

Voxengo's Curve EQ is a 'linear phase spline equaliser' with a 2048-point filter kernel, which lets you draw highly complex responses using its graphic interface.

Although most major MIDI + Audio sequencing applications include bundled EQ, dynamics and reverb plug-ins, they don't always sound too great, so many users are on the lookout for alternatives, like these two from Wave Arts.